


the star to every wandering ark

by teethandstars



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Arranged Marriage - to stop war, Body Swap, Body Swap - reveals pining is mutual, Dissociation, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 08:00:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16572713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teethandstars/pseuds/teethandstars
Summary: It had taken a while for the Council and Clarke to understand the priest when he spoke of a marriage of true minds. Drifting was a dangerous, taboo act that was illegal on the Ark. And the grounders apparently used it in their wedding ceremonies.





	the star to every wandering ark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Val_Creative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Creative/gifts).



Negotiations for the cessation of hostilities between the remnants of the Ark and the grounders was going about as well as Clarke expected, which was to say, they had started badly and had only gotten worse.

An arranged marriage between the Commander of the grounders and Wanheda, killer of three hundred of the Commander's greatest warriors, was somehow the compromise they had reached.

Most of the Council, including Clarke’s mother, was still under the impression that the giant of a man with tattoos up his face was the Commander. But Clarke had looked for Anya when the delegates arrived, and saw that Anya was never far from the girl who must be the true Commander.

The Commander was both exactly what Clarke expected and not at all what Clarke had expected. She was barely older than Clarke: a tall woman, slim as a sword and exponentially more deadly, with a soft, pretty face one of her attendants had attempted to harshen with a sharp and heavy application of cosmetics. The sticky black around her eyes would have been more intimidating if it did not make her eyes look so beautifully green. Clarke wanted to sketch her. She wanted to try to capture the hue of her irises and the exact shade of darkness that dwelled in the Commander’s blown-wide pupils. And then Clarke wanted the Commander to agree to a treaty of mutual non-aggression, to take her people, to go back to her city, and to never have to see her again.

She would have to see her again, though. Clarke would have to see the Commander for the rest of her life – however long that might be.

Abby wasn’t even supposed to be apart of the negotiations yet she had managed to take over. Although the Council had asked Abby, and she had consented, to recuse herself from working out the details of the marriage deal, the delegation from the grounders (the Twelve Clans, she had to remember to use their proper signifiers, now) had insisted on her presence. They reasoned that Clarke, as the Commander’s Skaikru bride, should have the support of her Skaikru family. It was a backwards view. Clarke could have told them her mother would only get in the way of progress, and that she would have preferred Abby elsewhere in any case. Clarke hadn’t been asked. And although Abby was furious about ‘selling Clarke off to some brute’ Clarke was all too aware her mother would have gone along with the Council’s wishes and bitten her tongue throughout the tense and endless meetings had it not been for one of the grounders’ stipulations.

As part of the marriage ritual for a Commander, the Commander and their bride enter into _medoteina_.

“Any marriage in good faith,” said the Commander’s skulking and imperious priest-advisor, “between the Commander and your daughter must involve the _medo_ _teina_. It is a sacred rite and to refuse it is to deny the marriage and the alliance.”

Abby was almost hissing at the priest. “Drifting, or _medoteina_ as you call it, is forbidden by our laws. And for good reason.”

It had taken a while for the Council and Clarke to understand the priest when he spoke of a marriage of true minds. Drifting was a dangerous, taboo act that was illegal on the Ark. And the grounders apparently used it in their wedding ceremonies.

The Ark possessed drift technology, of course, but it was so rarely used Clarke couldn’t think of anyone who had done it. It was kept clean and working and in the very back of some Council member's office cabinet. Drifting was considered a very last resort to save vital knowledge. No one from the Ark could even fathom how the grounders had managed to preserve the technology necessary to do it. From what Clarke could tell, the Twelve Clans were largely illiterate and had not managed to harness electricity. How did they manage to preserve drifting?

The delegations had been talking in circles for days now. It was the only issue left on the table. 

The priest— _Titus, the Flamekeeper, not priest_ —opened his mouth to retort but Clarke was done.

“Enough.”

All eyes turned towards her. Clarke looked into the eyes of the man pretending to be the Commander, and then turned her back on him to face the true Commander.

“If it is necessary that we drift, Commander, then we will.”

*

The chamber where the priest kept the ancient machinery that would force a drift between Clarke and the Commander was deep under the tower. The room was lit with many dozens of candles but even that amount wasn’t enough to fully illuminate the space. The machines sat in the center of the room: two hulking and ugly metal chairs that sat back to back. The headpieces, sinister claw-looking things that made Clarke's stomach somersault, nearly touched. They couldn’t still be functional. But if they were even _slightly_ functional they could seriously hurt or kill her—or worse, the Commander. If the Commander was killed or permanently injured during their wedding her people would blame the Ark. The alliance would be over.

There were too many people in the room. Titus and his assistants were bustling around with instruments and incense and Clarke didn’t know what. Anya and Gustus, the Commander’s guard who had pretended to be her, were backed up against the walls watching Clarke and the other Ark citizens present with muted disdain and distrust. Abby, Jackson, and the two Council representatives were also trying to stay out of the way, though Abby looked vaguely sickened. 

Throughout it all the Commander stood straight-backed and unmoving. Her head was up but her eyes were closed. She could have been a statue. She could have been a mountain. 

Titus finally stopped moving things around to go speak with her. One of Titus’ minions led Clarke over to the farther chair. “You will sit here,” the girl said. She had a slight accent and her tone was solemn, but not unkind.

Clarke sat in the chair but did not lean back. She wasn’t putting her head anywhere near the apparatus until she absolutely had to. A moment later, she heard the Commander take her place in the corresponding chair.

“It is time.” Titus was committed to the ominous bit. Clarke could only hope he knew what he was doing and wasn’t about to scramble her mind. Or the Commander’s.

She shifted back in the chair, letting her shoulder blades touch the back of the chair long before she finally tipped her neck to rest her head in the apparatus. She had a fleeting memory of an old movie she saw once on the Ark about an ancient queen who was beheaded.

Shoving the thought of beheadings from her mind, Clarke fixated on memories of sketching in her cell. That was the technique all the old manuals said worked best: remain calm, focus on a thought or scene of familiarity, an action repeated habitually, a scene neither joyful nor upsetting. Clarke and Wells had whispered excerpts from those guides to each other at sleep overs. Drifting had seemed as mysterious and adult and thrilling as sex, then: being inside someone, knowing someone so intimately, entwining your very minds. Now, drifting, _medoteina_ , just felt inevitable. And although it had been Clarke's decision in the end, she knew that for her there was no choice. Clarke would always choose to do what was necessary. 

She closed her eyes.  


Someone applied a balm to her temples. It was cool and sticky on her skin and smelled faintly sweet. Then strips of cloth were pressed into the oil. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation but it was troubling; she didn’t understand how the process was supposed to work as the grounders were performing it.

Silence crept over the room. Then there was a humming noise, soft at first but gaining volume. It wasn’t electrical as Clarke had feared, but natural. She imagined it sounded like the shift of movement in deep, deep water, but she had no way of really knowing.

The world felt strange and sinuous and more distant than another world’s star. For a moment, Clarke felt as though she wasn't quite herself...

And then it was over. The same girl who had directed Clarke into the chair earlier came to peel the fabric off Clarke’s head and give her another cloth, a damp one, to wipe off what turned out to be some sort of honey-based ointment.

Clarke caught Abby and Jackson’s incredulous expressions from the corner. She had been right, then. Whatever odd ritual she had just taken in part in either wasn’t a neural bridging...or the drift had failed.

*

After the chamber and the failed drift the world seemed bright, hazy, diaphanous. 

The rest of the wedding was public and a mess of pageantry and thinly veiled hostility between the clans and the Ark. Clarke and the Commander stood in a window of the tower, not so high that they could not be seen and heard by the teeming mass of the city but still above and apart.

There were so many people. Clarke knew it was possible for so many people to exist in the same time and place. She had watched the old vids of ancient games on the Ark just like anyone and had gone studied history in school. She knew that at humanity’s most populous there had been 11 billion people alive in the world. But she had never really grasped what it would feel like being one person among ten thousand. The Ark had contained thousands, but the ground had tens of thousands. And Clarke’s soon to be wife lead them all. 

Clarke could tell that the Commander was too well trained to fidget or shift with so many eyes on her (on them), but it seemed like she wanted to. Clarke was also anxious but she’d never been one for fidgeting. Clarke’s response to anxiety had always been detachment.

The Commander made a speech in Trigedasleng. Clarke hadn’t thought the grounders overly pleased with the alliance, but they roared for their leader when she finished speaking. Then the Commander turned to Clarke. For a moment, Clarke imagined she was the Commander, staring back at herself: achingly aware of the weight of the world on her shoulders, of the dark blood in her veins--

Clarke repeated words after the Commander in Trigedasleng. It was nearly an out of body experience, she felt so far away from herself. But her pronunciation must have been acceptable because then one of the attendants who waited on the Commander came forward with a wooden lacquer box. The Commander took it and pulled from it a little pouch. Clarke didn’t have time to be confused because the Commander opened the pouch and dipped two long fingers in. The tips of her fingers came out covered in a bright orange-gold powder. The Commander’s eyes flicked up to meet Clarke’s, silently asking for permission. Clarke nodded, and the Commander’s fingers came up to Clarke’s face. The Commander brushed the powder across her face in a thick line over her brow and four lines radiating down across her cheeks.

The Commander's fingers were the gentlest Clarke ever felt. Her touch lasted an eternity. They held each other’s gazes for a long second after and Clarke tried to understand what the Commander was thinking, what she was feeling, what she saw reflected in Clarke’s eyes. But she couldn’t understand at all and Clarke looked away.

Together they turned to face their people once more.

*

In the mornings, a tall, soft-spoken man named Enbri came to tutor Clarke in Trigedasleng. They would roam the tower, the parts where Clarke was allowed, and the city and he would patiently give her the words for anything she asked about. It doubled as a lesson in Trigedasleng and in the history and culture of the Trikru and the Twelve Clans. Many of the words Clarke could figure out the exact translation of, but they were based on so much old slang she sometimes had difficulty grasping the meaning of a word or phrase. _Flame_ , she had come to understand, was synonymous with Commander.

She tried asking Enbri more about the _medoteina_ without making it obvious that Clarke and the Commander’s _medoteina_ had failed spectacularly.

“What is the purpose of the _medoteina_?” She asked him in her slow and precise Trigeda as they strolled through one of the kitchen gardens. Clarke loved the city for its bustle and its novelty, but walking in the gardens around the tower was to be among green and growing things. She felt a sense of belonging there that she had never felt on her trips to Farm Station, where all the plant production was scrutinized endlessly and the people there spied on for the slightest infraction of the law.

Enbri seemed puzzled. “It is not for any but the Commander and the Commander’s spouse. It is for alliance.”

“ _Yes, but only the Commander why drift_?” Clarke tried again in Trigedasleng.

He corrected her. “Why does only the Commander drift?” She repeated the question quietly under her breath twice to get a feel for the syntax, then she asked him again.

Enbri shrugged. At least that syntax was universal.

“I am a scholar, but not one of the Flamekeepers. They are responsible for the safety of the Flame.”

Was it largely a safety mechanism, then? Did the wedding ritual include the sham drifting as a way of making enemies compliant, knowing that the Commander would have access to all his or her thoughts, plans, deepest secrets? Perhaps in the early days the Flamekeepers really were able to initiate the neural handshake. Perhaps the technology and knowledge had existed initially but was lost over time and now the motions were considered enough. Perhaps it was like symbolic, like those old religious ceremonies that claimed to drink wine as blood and eat bread as flesh. Perhaps they had no idea that drifting had once been a true meeting of the minds and not merely a metaphorical one.

Clarke felt eyes on side of her face. She didn’t turn her head, but saw from the corner of her eye a figure in one of the half broken windows several stories high.

For a moment, Clarke felt that she was in that window herself, looking down on a flash of gold in a garden. She felt such an immense longing in that moment--

\--and then the moment was gone.

*

It happened at the evening meal, because Clarke only ever really saw the Commander at the evening meal. _Dina_ , they called it. There were morning and midday meals as well, and Clarke might have seen the Commander at meals more often if she actually attended them in the Commander’s dining room (not a cafeteria, like the Ark, but an actual dining room like the old movies). But Clarke was having trouble adjusting to the idea of eating three times in one day. Only very young children ate so often on the Ark, and even then they were presented nowhere near the amount and variety of food.

Clarke looked forward to the meals more than she would ever had admitted. She ate at the Commander’s right hand, and while she still couldn’t understand everything that was being said, she was quickly becoming better at the language of the Trikru.

There was nothing really special about _dina_ that night. It was five or so weeks after the alliance was ratified with the marriage. Daily living in the tower as the _houmon_ of the Commander was still odd and unsettling, but she was adapting.

Clarke was distracted by the chatter of the young _naitbleedas_. They were volleying what seemed to be insults back and forth in rapid Trig, and Clarke was taking mental notes for later use. As she reached forward to take the pitcher of honeyed wine to pour herself another half cup—she was becoming soft, so soft in the luxury of her new position—when her hand brushed another warm hand reaching out and shocked them both.

It was the first time since their wedding that Clarke touched the Commander.

*

The next morning, Clarke's mind awoke inside a different body. She lay still for a very long time feeling the Flame course through her--and Lexa's heart beating.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it. I thought the bodyswap might make an interesting cultural difference between Clarke and Lexa in the context of an arranged marriage. 
> 
> The grounder term was made up by using [this dictionary](http://trigedasleng.info/dictionary/). medoteina = body + entwined ("tied").
> 
> The Ark terms for medoteina were swiped from Pacific Rim, although the actual effect is a lot different. I see it as the movie exists in universe and was the source of slang used by the Ark ancestors that has now become the actual terms they use.
> 
> Enbri < Greenbrier (River)
> 
> Title modified only by one letter from Shakespeare.


End file.
